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Team Canada junior stars could brighten gloom of lockout: Feschuk

As long as the NHL lockout work continues through Boxing Day, when Canada opens the world junior championship, hockey&rsquo;s dark days will suddenly be illuminated by some notable young stars on the global stage.

Kitchener Rangers head coach Steve Spott, centre, says there's a lot of uncertainty surrounding the make-up of the Canadian team for the upcoming world junior hockey championship due to the ongoing NHL lockout. (Philip Walker / Waterloo Region Record)

When Canadians venture overseas in search of world junior hockey gold, the planning is typically elaborate. In recent trips, they’ve brought their own food and a travelling chef. In Sweden a few years back, they commandeered their own hotel.

This holiday season in Ufa, Russia, they’re looking into bringing their own light. The latitude in Ufa is remote enough that sun-up and sundown are sometimes difficult to discern amid winter’s gloom. Steve Spott, the Toronto-born coach of Canadian squad, said that the lack of sunshine is enough of a concern that Hockey Canada has consulted sleep doctors and psychologists in an attempt to understand the probable effect of the bleakness on the 22 young men who’ll wear the Maple Leaf. Spott said one possible solution is regularly exposing the team to light boxes commonly used by people who live in places where the sun rarely shines for months at a time.

“They’re telling us to be prepared for 24 hours of dusk or darkness,” Spott was saying Tuesday in Kitchener, where he’s head coach of the OHL Rangers. “This is going to be one of the challenges. . . . Obviously your body is motivated by light. . . . We’ve got some plans to address that, to make sure the boys are getting the light that’s required.”

Ufa’s gloominess could be a metaphor for North America’s hockey landscape. Still, if NHL lockout years have been known to send the pro game’s faithful into the doldrums, they have also given Canada some of its greatest collections of world junior talent. As long as the current work stoppage continues through Boxing Day, when Canada opens the world junior tournament with a game against Germany, hockey’s dark days will suddenly be illuminated by some notable young stars on the global stage.

Chief among them is expected to be Ryan Nugent-Hopkins, the 2011 first overall draft pick of the Edmonton Oilers who missed last year’s tournament because he was busy racking up 52 points in 62 games as an 18-year-old NHL rookie. Assuming quiet on the NHL front, Nugent-Hopkins would be joined by a trio of centres — Mark Scheifele, Ryan Strome and Boone Jenner — who played on last year’s team. Add in a handful of other top NHL draft picks who would likely have been otherwise occupied in the pros — winger Jonathan Huberdeau, defencemen Dougie Hamilton and Ryan Murphy, goaltender Malcolm Subban among them — and the roster becomes impressive, even if the recent shoulder injury to top-tier defenceman Ryan Murray weakens the back line.

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That’s not to say the current crop of under-20s will compare with the squad that represented Canada during the 2004-05 lockout. That team featured the likes of Sidney Crosby, Mike Richards, Corey Perry, Ryan Getzlaf and Dion Phaneuf. It went 6-0, racked up a 41-7 goal differential and capped its dominance with a 6-1 gold-medal wipeout of a Russian team that included Alex Ovechkin and Evgeni Malkin. Canada’s lineup during the 1994-95 work stoppage, which included Ryan Smyth, Darcy Tucker and Ed Jovanovski, was no minnow, either.

“If you’re going to rate (the lockout-year teams) 1-2-3, this would be the third team,” said Kevin Prendergast, Hockey Canada’s head scout. “That 2005 team was unbelievable. They probably could have beat a lot of American league teams — there’s no doubt about it. But this team is going to be excellent.”

For Spott, the implied expectation is understood.

“The most common question I’ve got . . . is, ‘Why would you want to put yourself in this position?’ It’s because this is what we do. For me, it’s first and foremost an honour. And it’s a challenge I look forward to,” said Spott. “If there’s anything I would say to Canadian hockey fans, it’s that this has become a global sport. It’s no longer Canada’s divine right to win gold medals at any level.

“The bar has been raised. But it hasn’t changed our mindset where it is gold or nothing.”

Spott is intimately aware that Canada hasn’t won gold at the tournament since 2009. He was an assistant coach on the 2010 team that lost to the U.S. in overtime in the gold-medal game, and he has watched from a distance as Canada won silver in 2011 and bronze in 2012. If Spott’s resumé is impressively international — he was the head coach of Canada’s gold-medal-winning under-18 team at the 2011 Ivan Hlinka tournament, and he coached the OHL all-stars during the recent Subway Series against Russia — his foundations are distinctly GTA.

He grew up near the intersection of Bayview and Sheppard Aves., and attended high school at Father Henry Carr, this before his work as a speedy winger helped tiny Colgate University to a Cinderella trip to the 1990 championship game of the NCAA Frozen Four.

The height of a brief pro playing career was a 20-game stint in the AHL, but Spott has known his share of future NHLers. Adam Graves was a childhood friend, and Spott logged some of his first coaching experiences in the GTHL while coaching his nephew, Stephen Weiss, when Weiss and another future NHLer named Jason Spezza ruled the atom ranks. Spott also coached at Seneca College and with the junior A Markham Waxers in the days before another old friend, current New Jersey Devils head coach Peter DeBoer, hired him to work for the OHL’s Plymouth Whalers in the late 1990s, first as a scout, then as an assistant coach. After a long apprenticeship and a move to Kitchener, Spott succeeded DeBoer as the Rangers’ head coach and GM in 2008. Last year Spott, who has two children with his Unionville-raised wife, Lisa, was handed a seven-year contract extension that promises to keep him in what he calls “the best franchise in the CHL” through 2017-18.

Will Spott be able to lead Canada to its first world junior gold in four years? Certainly the state of the NHL’s labour talks will have a say. While there’d no doubt be widespread rejoicing if the NHL lockout came to a pre-Christmas end, it could make for some unusually dark days in Ufa.

Spott said there are a handful of “ghost rosters” being formulated. One assumes the lockout will continue and Canada’s full contingent of talent — including six returning players from last year’s team — will be on hand. Another includes the NHL-drafted players who, even if the work stoppage ends before the tournament, most likely will be back in junior and available for service. A third, something of a worst-case scenario, assumes none of the six returnees will be released from their NHL duties.

“There’s a lot of uncertainty,” said Spott. “But if Hockey Canada does one thing extremely well, it’s pay attention to detail.”

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